From the Minaret to the Microphone: Ryan Walters and the Global Melodrama Over a Man Named Ryan ISTANBUL—Somewhere between the spires of Hagia Sophia and the neon of Times Square, the name “Ryan Walters” has taken on the faint whiff of geopolitical farce. To the average Ankara taxi driver, it means nothing. To the average…
Real Sociedad: A Basque Boutique in the Age of Oil-Drenched Superclubs By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between the Guggenheim and the Metaverse Donostia-San Sebastián—If the Champions League is Europe’s loudest vanity fair, Real Sociedad are the quiet guest who arrives in a tailored linen suit, orders a single glass of txakoli, and still ends up running…
Como 1 – Sassuolo 0 Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia, Northern Italy, Saturday evening. The fog rolls off Lake Como like a hung-over diplomat slinking out of a five-star summit, and somewhere between the water and the floodlights a football match breaks out—apparently of interest to more than the 11,000 locals too polite to admit they’d rather…
The Global Afterlife of Jodie Sweetin, or How America Exports Nostalgia One Half-Hug at a Time It is 3:17 a.m. in Kyiv, and a twenty-three-year-old drone-pilot named Yevhen is watching grainy reruns of Full House to stay awake on a twelve-hour shift. When Stephanie Tanner waltzes in with her catchphrase arsenal—“How rude!”—Yevhen laughs into his…
Istanbul, Wednesday night, and the Bosphorus is doing its usual two-continent tango while 50 000 people in yellow-and-navy are screaming themselves hoarse. Fenerbahçe—never just a football club, more a geopolitical mood ring—has once again reminded the planet that sport is politics with shin guards. From the outside, it looks like a simple Champions League qualifier:…
Tonight, in a windowless studio somewhere between a tax haven and a tax headache, six plastic balls tumbled out of a glorified popcorn machine and rewrote destinies from Lagos to Ljubljana. The numbers—3, 17, 24, 33, 41, with a “bonus” 7 that looked suspiciously like an afterthought—have already been translated into 47 languages, meme-ified in…
Igor Jesus, the 23-year-old Brazilian striker now plying his trade at Sporting CP, is not the messiah of global football—he’s just another very expensive boy with good calves. Yet in a world where a misplaced pass can tank a cryptocurrency and a transfer fee can outstrip the GDP of Tuvalu, Igor’s €10 million price tag…
James Comey: The Man Who Made Bureaucracy a Global Spectator Sport By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Watching the World Burn PARIS—In the grand tradition of international intrigue, few things are as reliably entertaining as watching a tall, earnest American ex-FBI director wander the planet like a remorseful giraffe, signing books and explaining—again—why he…
Ligue 1: The French Farce That Keeps the Planet Spinning By A. Correspondent Who Has Slept in Too Many Airport Lounges PARIS—On any given weekend, while glaciers calve and trade ministers slap new tariffs on each other, twenty French football clubs perform the same ritual: they jog onto perfectly manicured pitches to chase a sphere…
Ryder Cup Opening Ceremony: A Pageant of Flags, Fortune, and Thinly-Veiled National Anxiety by our correspondent in Marco Simone, nursing a Campari in the media tent The Ryder Cup opening ceremony has always been golf’s answer to Eurovision: flags the size of small nations, anthems belted out by choirs that sound like they’ve been told…
The Washington Skyline Gets a New Hole and the World Winces in Recognition By the time the first shaky TikTok reached Buenos Aires, the Potomac had already swallowed whatever remained of American Airlines 5342. Somewhere between Reagan National and the river’s muddy applause, the mid-air pirouette with a Black Hawk helicopter turned the U.S. capital…
Real Sociedad vs Mallorca: A Microscopic War on the Edge of the Known Universe By Our Man in San Sebastián, Still Recovering from Last Night’s Pintxo Moral Hangover In the grand, indifferent sweep of the cosmos, two football clubs from Spain’s northern and Balearic peripheries will collide tonight on a patch of grass so exquisitely…
